Israel-Hamas Ceasefire prompts fresh calls for access to Gaza for foreign journalists

Author: Devin Windelspecht, MSc

October 16, 2025

HRRC echoes calls for foreign reporters to be allowed into the Gaza Strip following the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, and emphasizes the need for journalists to be permitted to independently report within Gaza without fear of intimidation or censorship.

Displaced Palestinians walking to northern Gaza on October 10, 2025 [Image credit: AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana]

Following a U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Hamas and Israel that has brought to a halt a 2-year conflict, press freedom groups have renewed urgent calls for Israel to permit access to foreign reporters into the Gaza Strip. 

The call for access into the Strip originates from organizations including the Foreign Press Association (FPA), which represents international news outlets working in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as the International Press Institute and Reporters without Borders (RSF). In a statement on X, the FPA called for restrictions on foreign journalists to come to an end in tandem with the ceasefire. 

“For the last two years, the FPA and its members have asked, through all channels, to be let into Gaza to report on the reality of the war. These demands have been repeatedly ignored, while our Palestinian colleagues have risked their lives to provide tireless and brave reporting from Gaza,” the FPA said.

The renewed push for access follows a joint call earlier this year by the Associated Press, BBC, Agence France-Presse (AFP) and Reuters that demanded Israel permit foreign journalists into Gaza. A separate letter, signed by over 200 international media outlets in July, also called for access into Gaza for foreign journalists.

International reporters have been largely banned from Gaza since the October 7 attacks, with the exception of a few reporters who have been allowed to visit the Strip through closely monitored embedments with the Israeli military. These embedments have been criticized for their requirement to pass content by Israeli military censors before publication.

To date, the Israel-Hamas war has resulted in the deaths of at least 237 journalists and media workers, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the vast majority Palestinian journalists killed by Israel. Israel has been accused of assassinating journalists during the war, and Palestinian journalists have been forced to endure starvation, displacement and trauma from the deaths of friends and family members. 

In July, conditions for Palestinian journalists had deteriorated to the point that AFP pleaded for Israel to give its freelance journalists permission to leave the Gaza Strip, citing pervasive starvation experienced by the agency’s reporters.

Over the last two years, Israel has killed over 65,000 Palestinians; of those, 16,000 were killed since a previous ceasefire collapsed in March, as many as 93% of whom are believed to be civilians, according to data gathered by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project. Israel’s actions have met the definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, according to international genocide scholars, who have noted Israeli government officials’ use of dehumanizing language targeting Palestinians, famine resulting from Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and the disproportionate killing of civilians as evidence of genocidal intent. 

Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, during the October 7, 2023 attacks. The attack was a war crime and crime against humanity, according to Human Rights Watch, which cited the murder of civilians, hostage-taking, sexual violence and the desecration of bodies committed by Hamas militants during the attacks.

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Glossary

• Assassinate – a premeditation killing for political or reasons. 

• Blockade – preventing movement of people or goods into or out of a given location. 

• Brokered – facilitated by. 

• Ceasefire – a halt to active conflict, separate from a peace agreement, which is a formal agreement to permanently end a war or conflict.

• Censor – remove information considered politically harmful to a given government or group.

• Crimes against humanity – crimes that violate the dignity and human rights of a person as decided by international human rights law.

• Dehumanizing – language that presents people as less than human or deserving of human rights.

• Desecrate – mutilation of a body to rob the body of dignity after a person’s death.

• Deteriorate – worsen. 

• Displacement – being forced to move, under threat of harm or death, from one place to another.

• Disproportionate – civilian casualties much larger than what is to be expected by an army following international laws surrounding armed conflict. 

• Embedment – a journalism practice of following a military unit, often in exchange for the military to review footage and interviews gathered before publication. 

• Famine – widespread hunger resulting in mass deaths from starvation. 

• Freelance – independent journalists who are not part of the staff of any one news outlet. 

• Genocide – the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, an ethnic, national, religious, or other group. Examples include, but are not limited to, the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide. 

• Originate – come from. 

• Pervasive – widespread. 

• Tandem – together with. 

• Trauma – intense emotional damage caused from witnessing a particularly emotionally devastating event. 

• War crime – actions that violate the laws of war, as outlined in international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions.